WomensNet News

January 18th 2017

Our 2016 Amber Grant Finalists

After much debate amongst our Advisory board we’ve narrowed down our Amber Grant Finalists to Three. Congrats to NAJMTEK, GloveStix, and Yellow Scope! Please read to learn more about these inspiring women and their businesses.

When Sophie’s daughter was six years old she was diagnosed with dyslexia. With Sophie’s strong background in engineering alongside 12 years of experience in product development she saw this as an opportunity. She wanted to create an adaptive and innovative learning tool for dyslexic people, to help them learn, read, and work without having dyslexia in the way. This is how the Ubook was created.

The UBook is the first all-in-one multi-touch laptop, an interactive technology that includes the first ever neurological “sign alphabet”, and assistive apps, especially designed for people having dyslexia to help them learn, work, and communicate with others without having dyslexia in the way.

Have you ever caught a whiff of old sports gear? It smells awful. The smell is caused by bacteria that lives in the humid air of your sports gear. And every time you sweat… that odor increases. Most types of gloves and shoes are primarily made of leather making them virtually impossible to clean without compromising the shape or comfort to the athlete. Enter, GloveStix. GloveStix, are a patent pending odor management system for smelly sports gear. When placed into gloves or shoes after practice or games they absorb harmful moisture, eliminate odors and inhibit 99.9% of odor-causing bacteria growth in about 24 hrs.

Yellow Scope was founded in 2014 by scientists and moms, Marcie Colledge and Kelly McCollum. Marcie and Kelly met in 2008 at their children’s elementary school as volunteers running the school’s STEM programs, including Family Science Nights and the Science Fair. Their “aha moment” was realizing how well they work together and how passionate they both are about science, girls, and education. Over the years, this grew into an idea to build a company that would help young girls fall in love with science. Thus Yellow Scope was born! At Yellow Scope, they make rigorous, creative (and fun!) science kits for girls. Each kit is lovingly assembled by hand in Portland, Oregon.

We will be announcing our second annual Amber Grant winner very soon – Stay Tuned!

Voting has already begun for our next Amber Grant on our voting page. So please stop by there and read about our newest qualification grant winners.